Piano Recital of the Students of Janáček Academy

Antonín Dvořák: Two Piano Pieces (Lullaby and Capriccio), B188
Josef Suk: Spring
Leoš Janáček: On the Overgrown Path

 

The piano students of the Music Faculty of JAMU will perform the compositions of three great Czech musicians in the authentic environment of the Leoš Janáček Memorial on the master’s Erhbar instrument, which was given to him as a wedding gift and accompanied him throughout his life.

In his second, successful year at the New York Conservatory, Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) decided to spend his summer holidays at home in Bohemia, at his summer residence in Vysoká. There, in 1894, he composed the piano cycle Humoresques, and immediately set about composing another. However, he did not complete it, as it remained only a torso consisting of two compositions, Lullaby and Capriccio. These compositions were published after the composer’s death in 1911. 

Dvořák’s beloved pupil and later son-in-law Josef Suk composed his piano cycle Spring in perhaps the happiest period of his life, in 1902. With the Bohemian Quartet he conquered the world as a second violinist, he composed, and together with his beloved wife Otylka he rejoiced at the birth of his son Josef. However, this harmonious period soon ended with the death of Antonín Dvořák and shortly afterwards also Otylka. The cycle reflecting the composer’s lyricism and personal happiness is one of Suk’s top piano compositions. 

The first series of the piano cycle of poetic pieces On the Overgrown Path was composed successively in 1900, 1908 and 1911. Janáček wrote the five pieces of the cycle in 1900, when he was 46 years old. They were published as small pieces for harmonium in the Slavonic Melodies booklets, published by the Ivančice teacher Emil Kolář. The expansion of the cycle was influenced by the editor Jan Branberger, who in 1908 contracted the publisher Bedřich Kočí in Prague to publish the compositions. This publisher’s interest in publishing the existing works led Janáček to compose further movements, so that the cycle grew to ten numbers, to which the composer attached poetic titles. These small, intimate pieces reflecting some of the composer’s memories are now among his best known and most performed works.

Jiří Zahrádka